There are 49 seats in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, and April Ryan has one of them.

“Third row, smack in the middle,” said the veteran White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks. “It was 20 years ago, Jan. 13, 1997, that I first walked into the room … black girl from Baltimore who frequented the areas as a child where Freddie Gray was picked up by the police — sometimes I still go to churches in that area. So coming from that place to the White House, where the world comes and looks at what we’re doing, is nothing short of amazing to me.”

Ryan visited the Metro Detroit area to promote her new book, “At Mama’s Knee: Mothers and Race in Black and White,” which explores race relations in America today through a series of intimate interviews with the Obama family, Harry Belafonte, Hillary Clinton and other cultural icons. On Thursday, she met with a small group at the Cranbrook House to discuss her book, along with the thrill of being a distinguished member of the White House press corps.

Given the multiple platforms of digital and print news, not to mention "alternative facts," Dr. James Denny of Bloomfield Township asked how can the public tell the difference between real news and fake news.

“My concern is that so much is being thrown at the media in general that is slightly false, kind of false, very slanted … that instead of challenging it, you basically start describing it more as entertainment,” he said.

Reporting on the nation’s 45th president is going to prove challenging, Ryan told the group. But she promises that she and her colleagues are up to the task.

“You have to give us a minute,” she said. “Because he’s throwing so much at us, we have to nail it down and make sure what he’s saying isn’t right, before we go out there and say something is a lie.”

At the same time, there are conversations about the future of the briefing room, and whether it’s going to continue under the new administration. Betty DuBose of Southfield asked Ryan about her outlook regarding President Donald Trump.

“We know Washington and how it typically works,” Ryan said. “This is something totally new and we are taking each moment as it comes. We are prayerful that we stay in that room, but I’ll tell you something — if they try and kick us out, we are going to fight and we are going to fight hard because we are built into the framework of this nation, freedom of the press and the Fourth Estate.”

She then talked about the difficulty in trying to cover the nation’s most powerful public figure, who lately tends to bypass the mainstream media.

“This president will fight with someone on Twitter,” she said. “It’s a new day and a new way of handling this job. He is the president of the United States, and it’s not about me liking it or not — I have a job to do.”

Thursday's meet-and-greet was hosted by Arlyce Seibert, Patricia Batey, Emery King, Latonya Riddle-Jones and Carla Young. On Friday, Ryan was scheduled for a book-signing event Friday evening at the Baldwin Public Library that was organized by the Race Relations & Diversity Task Force.